Explosions ripped through a fireworks factory in eastern Australia, damaging or destroying 50 buildings and throwing New Year's Eve fireworks displays in three state capitals in doubt, officials said Sunday, according to AP. At least 10 homes in Wallerawang, 160 kilometers (100 miles) north of Sydney, were temporarily evacuated and emergency services kept their distance as blasts continued and fire spread through the factory, said Rebel Talbert, a spokeswoman for New South Wales state Rural Fire Service. People reported hearing the explosions 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, she said. Authorities set up a 1-kilometer (half-mile) overnight exclusion zone around the Howard and Sons Fireworks factory, Talbert said. A police bomb squad entered the site on Sunday and were examining the wreckage to find the cause of the explosions, which started in a shipping container used to store fireworks. They declared the area safe Sunday evening, and evacuated residents were allowed to return to their homes. Owner Andrew Howard said 20 buildings on the 154-hectare (380-acre) property were razed and 30 others were damaged. Plans for New Year's Eve fireworks displays in the capitals of three states were now in doubt because of the damage, Howard said. No workers were at the factory at the time of the blasts, but it appeared that other containers at the site had been tampered with, raising suspicions that someone broke in, said police Superintendent Greg Martin. «There's a lot of debris and rubble that has to be sorted through yet, to try and find if there are persons inside, but I can tell you there were no people legitimately on the site when the explosion occurred,» he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. Howard said the fireworks were professional quality and not considered unstable. «These fireworks ... they are not deemed to be extremely sensitive,» he said, adding they «really require ignition or an ignition source, or a fire or sparks of some nature, to set them off.» The company says it put on pyrotechnics displays at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games last year, the 2002 soccer World Cup in Korea, and other events.
